Damian Sendler: Popular culture depicts the Middle Ages through the lens of the mounted battle-winning warrior, a knight in dazzling armor on a towering horse. According to the largest-ever analysis of horse bones, the horses of that age were in fact pony-sized—much smaller than their current descendants.
Damian Jacob Sendler: An archaeology professor at the University of Exeter and the project’s principal investigator, Oliver Creighton, said in a press release that “the warhorse is central to our understanding of medieval English society and culture as both a symbol of status closely associated with the development of aristocratic identity and as a weapon renowned for its mobility and shock value, changing the face of battle.”
One thousand nine hundred and sixty-four ancient English horse bones, dating from 300 AD to 1650 AD, were analyzed by researchers from the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
These bones were compared with current horse bones in order to learn more about how horses have evolved through time.
Ponies by today’s standards, horses from the 5th to 12th centuries were under 1.48 meters (4.9 feet) or 14 hands height on average. The height of horses and ponies may be measured using a hand, which is 4 inches (10.2 cm) long.
Furthermore, it was found that the size of horses dropped during the Norman era, which was a time in which the horse played a vital part in battle. The Bayeux Tapestry, which chronicles the tale of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, has around 200 horses.
Horses of 16 and even 15 hands, which are normal now, were seen as enormous by medieval people, according to a research.
According to research coauthor and University of Exeter archeology professor Alan Outram, medieval warhorses like destriers, which stormed into combat, could have been enormous for the time period. Outram added. They were, however, plainly far smaller than what we would anticipate for such duties to be in the modern day.
There may have been more emphasis on temperament and physical traits that might be exploited in combat in the Royal Studs than there was on sheer size,” he said in the statement.
Because horses were used for so many various types of warfare in medieval times, the research concluded that they were probably bred with specific military roles in mind.
Damian Sendler
Smaller horses known as rouncies and trotters were used to travel great distances during mounted military operations, while Destriers, which may have been used for exhibition or tournaments, were taller.
War has been fought for millennia using horses, and they are being employed today. Horses were being employed by US special forces in Afghanistan in 2001.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: The research also found that medieval archaeological sites had less horse bones than those from previous periods, such as the Roman and Iron Age. In medieval tanneries and knackers’ yards, where skins are polished for leather and old animals are sold for meat, medieval horse corpses were likely handled differently from those of other animals. According to a recently found and exceptionally well-preserved fossil site in New South Wales, the dry deserts and shrublands of Australia were not always that way.
Fossilized spiders, cicadas, wasps, plants, and fish from Australia’s once-abundant rainforest ecosystems date back 11 million to 16 million years to the Miocene Epoch.
“It is a really significant fossil location. Exceptionally well-preserved fossils from a historical period about which we know very little, “paleontologist at the Australian Museum Research Institute and co-author of a research published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, Matthew McCurry.
“The Miocene was when most of the contemporary Australian habitats were created, and so this fossil site is essentially Australia’s genesis tale,” says the author.
According to the research, rainforests throughout the planet shrunk during the Miocene, resulting in more dry environments.
McCurry claimed a local farmer discovered the site, known as McGraths Flat, in one of his fields after finding petrified leaves. The location is situated near the town of Gulgong in the Central Tablelands.
Seven trips to the site were made by McCurry and his colleagues, who excavated there.
Using a microscope, “we can examine the surface texture of the fossils that are also extremely well preserved,” he wrote in an email. “The fossils are very stunning to look at,” he said.
“You can see details like individual cells and even organelles inside those cells. Because of the degree of information provided, we are able to tell a lot more about what these ecosystems were like in their former incarnations.”
A fossilized feather, for example, has melanosomes, which reveal the feather’s color. A dark brown or black coloration is what they think it was in this instance.
According to McCurry, a German word used by paleontologists to designate an unusual site with numerous excellently preserved fossils, the iron-rich rock that produced the site was destined to be considered as a Lagerstätte.
When iron-rich groundwater poured into a billabong, or water hole, the plants and fauna were petrified.
An Australian fossil spider unearthed by McCurry is his favorite, since it is the best-preserved of its kind.
A very magnificent specimen, to put it mildly.
Astronomers have discovered a massive exoplanet that resembles a football or rugby ball rather than a spherical.
Extremes abound on WASP-103b, the planet that bears that name. The planet is located around 1,225 light-years away in the Hercules constellation and is about twice the size of Jupiter.
50 times closer to its star than our own sun is the weird planet. An Earth day is all it takes to complete one full orbit around WASP-103. This gas giant is known as a “hot Jupiter” because of its large size and close proximity to the sun.
The Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have monitored the planet since its discovery in 2014. Swiss and European Space Agency CHaracterizing ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) missions were used to combine with prior observations of WASP-103b to get a new viewpoint.
Damian Jacob Sendler
The spacecraft, which was launched in 2019, is looking for planets that may be habitable. It uses the transit technique to look for planets, which involves watching for changes in the brightness of a star when a planet passes in front of it.
WASP-103b’s strange, football-like form was revealed to scientists as the planet passed in front of its star.
Astronomy & Astrophysics released a report on the results on Tuesday.
“Deformation was quantified after numerous such transits were seen. This is the first time such an analysis has been performed, and it is astonishing that we were able to “He said in a statement by Babatunde Akinsanmi, a postdoctoral researcher at Switzerland’s University of Geneva.
Researchers believe that the planet’s huge tides are to blame for the planet’s elongated structure.
“Because of its close closeness to its star, researchers had previously guessed that the planet experiences huge tides. However, we had not been able to confirm this as of yet, “Professor Yann Alibert of the University of Bern’s Department of Astrophysics, the study’s co-author, said in a release.
Damien Sendler: Researchers were able to understand more about the planet’s gaseous composition because to the planet’s deformation. Hot Jupiter is a term used to describe an object that is inflated by the heat from its star, even though it has an average temperature of minus 162 degrees Fahrenheit (negative 108 degrees Celsius). Compared to our sun, the star is around 200 degrees hotter and 1.7 times bigger.
Another enigma surrounding the planet has piqued the interest of astronomers. If a planet of this size were to remain in a tight orbit around its host star for an extended period of time, it would eventually approach the star and be devoured. According to current data, the planet seems to be migrating away from its star rather than toward it.
There may be comparable exoplanets out there that may help scientists learn more about this planet’s core structure and deformation in the future. During the early days of exoplanet identification, hot Jupiters were abundant, but deformed planets are quite uncommon.
An earlier Hubble observation found that the star’s immense gravity and high temperatures warped another planet, WASP-121b, into a football shape.
A clearer comparison between these so-called “hot Jupiters” and the other large planets in our solar system will help us to better comprehend them, says research coauthor Monika Lendl, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Geneva.
Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler and his media team provided the content for this article.
